Primary Colors
by TheWestDriver
Summary: Once upon a time, a prince fell in love with two very different women. Gelphie femslash.


A/N: If you can call this musical!Fiyero angst session a Gelphie fanfic, then you're a very devoted fan. It's weird and metaphorical, but I've been fascinated by the way Fiyero would feel if Elphaba and Glinda ended up together. It would be a happy ending for everyone but him.

Review if you'd like, I love feedback!

Disclaimer: If I owned Wicked, Gelphie would be more canon than it already is.

* * *

**Blue on Blue, part 1**

It's the perfect shade of blue, his suit. It's full of alluringly bright, tasteful tones, and the mother-of-pearl buttons and deep azure tie he wears to match are a surefire way to attract the opposite sex. This is a lesson learned from experience.

That was the suit he wore on the day he first bedded a woman, some beautiful young aristocrat from Frottica (two years his senior to boot) back when he lived in the northern family castle. Kiamo Ko has always been too dreary to properly entertain guests.

He remembers how his friends howled when he bragged about the woman, but he neglected to inform them of his earlier embarrassment. (_It my first time… and you're so, so beautiful.)_ He still flushes at the memory. At least she was kind.

Fashioning himself an outdoorsman, Fiyero enjoys the sea breeze of the southern coast and the endless ocean that spreads before him. He likes the idea of infinity, of something that can be washed up shallowly at his toes and extend to a depth beyond the human imagination. He likes that the sky fills his lungs and escapes him when he is simply too full of life.

Blue is universal. (Fiyero is _trying_ to be universal.)

Fiyero loves blue because it's a little bit like being beautiful.

xxx

It's a spectacular agony he feels in the core of his bones, far beyond the subtle sting of fractures and broken marrow. He writhes and shrieks (why is he thinking of Elphaba still?) and extends his fingers like he'll never feel them again. The wound is not a wound so much as a reshaping, but Fiyero is struggling to find words to describe the loss of his dependable, strong muscles.

Blood pours from his bitten tongue (tastes like hay) and he gasps lowly for air until he hears the fleeing footsteps of the Gale Force. It's magic, he knows, that must be doing this to his body, but who would inflict such pain on another human being?

The soldiers have run off, probably to report to their superiors (why is he thinking of Glinda still?) and the prince feels like a lump of raw dough turning into a stack of needles. It's his heartbeat that frightens him the most, and when the familiar thudding recedes, Fiyero begins weeping on the dirty floor of the cellar. He is alive (it still hurts, it hurts, it hurts) and his blue eyes are drying up like spent wells, but he falls unconscious. It is a blessing to find darkness, and Fiyero's pain is gone for a brief moment.

When he wakes, the man is void of all color.

* * *

**Blue on Red**

Her ribbons and dresses are mostly pink, but Glinda can be nothing but red to Fiyero. He wonders sometimes if she delves into every aspect of her life with her usual passion (when he thinks of _every_ aspect of Glinda, Fiyero needs to clear his mind.) She is the color of roses, royalty, lovers, lipstick, and all the things she's ever wanted to be.

Glinda is a color of blood, but Fiyero isn't sure why this image comes to mind. (Maybe the way she bickers with her roommate? Maybe the urge to protect her from pain?)

And later, when her dainty fingers dig like pin-needles into his arm, Fiyero can only see red when he looks at the diamond ring wrapped around her hand.

xxx

_They are in his dorm room, breathing heavily and kissing on top of his bed. Fiyero is pushing his luck like he's always done, hand gliding up her smooth thigh, and Glinda suddenly pulls away from beneath him. As she sits up, her blank eyes settle somewhere on his desk._

"_What's wrong?" he asks. _

"_I've never," she begins. Her tongue moistens her lips, "I've never done this with a boy before." _

_He doesn't hear the emphasis on her words until later in the evening, when he is alone in bed and curious about why she bothered clarifying. Fiyero dreams that night of smeared red on green, no blue in sight. _

xxx

Every delicate word and demure smile could send ten thousand Ozians to war. A wave of Glinda's white hand and so many men would lay down their lives to defend their Queen (and that's what she is, really, nothing else is befitting.) Glinda would not see the rotting corpses and broken families but she would know how it feels to be shattered glass: unfixable, pretty, sharp like the smell of blood.

Her mind is crippling when she needs it to be, and Fiyero knows very well that Glinda is a wonderful giver of love (and a better giver of pain.) Selfish like the color red, down to the very core.

Many times in her youth Glinda tries to water down this image by painting herself in pink, but Fiyero isn't fooled. (He knows Elphaba isn't fooled either.) Her fan club at Shiz is wearing rose-colored glasses, and that's not a surprise. Fiyero knows the types that cling to royalty and beauty; he knows the moochers and fair-weather friends better than Glinda herself. In a way, Fiyero thinks, Glinda clings to brilliance and the shiny brightness of her dear roommate.

She's never clung to Fiyero like that.

* * *

**Blue on Green**

The obvious choice for Elphaba is green, no doubt about it, but overlooking her strange skin leads Fiyero to the same conclusion. Elphaba is a deep, yawning forest, all shadows and mystery and intrigue just waiting to be discovered. She is the lovely walking contradiction of earth and magic, of natural and unnatural, of inner beauty and outer plainness.

(He won't tell anyone, but she's got a face so gorgeous he can't sleep at night.)

Her life is driven like a lightning bolt, no stops or mindless wandering. Elphaba is dangerous ideas and poetic words (even angry ones like _you're so thoughtless sometimes.) _Green has a value, a meaning, much more than the other colors. She thinks she's aloof and superior, above the crowded, uneducated masses, and Fiyero can watch her hold back biting comments when something foolish is said in class. Elphaba doesn't need to be forgiving (who was forgiving to her?) and she certainly never forgets.

Even though it hurts to admit, green is the color of life and struggle, and nothing else will do for a girl like Elphaba.

xxx

Her clover skin distracts Fiyero from the lecture, he can practically smell her lotion (perfume, or shampoo, maybe?) and she glances up with pursed lips from behind her glasses. Elphaba fears not the world of man, her face says so, and Fiyero has no clue how to proceed with the unsolved green girl.

So she drags him along like a vine, just like she's always been capable of doing if someone would just give her the chance. (She likes having a backup plan, and Fiyero's perfect, as Glinda says.)

When he saves her, he thinks he has her completely and honestly and the romance is palpable (his mind slips to Glinda on impulse) but he forgets the cardinal rule of green. Elphaba is the hero, not the heroine. The champion with her crown of green laurel leaves gets to decide the end of the story.

xxx

_They sit at the back tables in the library, far away from prying eyes and eavesdroppers, not that most students of Shiz would bother trying to find the green girl with her nose in a book. _

_Fiyero pretends not to be offended at her lack of interest in their discussion, but Elphaba's monosyllabic answers are beginning to injure his pride. She doesn't even lift her sandy eyes to his face when he's speaking. _

_Then Glinda flies around a corner with a whispered, "Elphie!" and she demands the bookworm's full and immediate attention. Elphaba closes her book without pause, and smiles._

_Fiyero loathes how hard he has to try._

_

* * *

  
_

**Blue on Green and Red**

Elphaba has a hero's rich voice (hero, not heroine, because heroines are just so feeble-sounding) that Glinda compliments with her flute-pitch giggle, and Fiyero's almost-tenor adds another layer to their laughing symphony.

It gives him a sense of completion when the three of them spend time together. They fit like puzzle pieces, and Fiyero wonders if it's implausible to believe he can have them both.

Selfish, yes. But it seems conceivable when the trio is united.

(He's had dreams about the two of them, and Fiyero likes what he sees.)

But his idea falters momentarily when he realizes that the conversation doesn't involve him. It has actually _never _involved him, not since he knocked on the wooden door of the girls' room. He ignores it.

But still, it is when the primary colors are together that he is happiest, probably because they match and make the prettiest pictures in his head. (Three is one too many, he knows. He bites back his tongue when Glinda and Elphaba are speaking so that he doesn't interrupt or say something rude because all he really wants is their attention and they're so good at ignoring him even when he's right there in front of them.)

Glinda's hand touches her roommate's knee, and Fiyero doesn't miss the way Elphaba leans into her, pearly teeth easily visible in the dorm's electric lighting. They laugh very closely together (like a kiss) and Fiyero tightens his fist until his knuckles dig into the carpeted floor.

_Am I intruding?_

The girls turn to him when the laughter subsides, but tiny smiles still remain, and Glinda's hand remains, and Elphaba's peacefulness remains.

"I'll see you ladies tomorrow," Fiyero says. And they send him off without a second glance.

* * *

**Blue on Blue, part 2**

His world is done now, nothing like the shallow, superficial happiness he'd known as a younger man. Fiyero is a Scarecrow, an idol, an inanimate object that moves like the prince he used to be. He is brown (or blank), not that it matters what color a straw man should be, and no one else seems to think that his new color is beautiful.

He should have known back at Shiz what would become of him. He should have seen it when the red and green whirlwind swept to the Emerald City and returned with responsibility and unified suffering and the loneliness of the gap between them. (People do mourn the wicked.)Glinda was always preoccupied (and it's not as if she didn't notice the way he looked at her friend) and Elphaba was gone far, far away, probably moving mountains and starting revolutions.

Fiyero is blindsided still. His broken hope is buried deep inside his weak chest (no room for a heart or a brain or courage, but plenty of room for destroyed dreams.) Elphaba is not hidden, her green is in plain sight, or as plain as sight can be when she stands in the plaza of the Emerald City. Glinda defends her friend (stop lying) from the masses, ten kinds of furious red at every turn, and no one dares defy them.

They both have their pretty, gorgeous, mystifying, fleshy bodies to keep each other company in the dark nights (Fiyero has no company) and he is certain that they have found the answers they sought before the Wizard floated away.

"Really," the Scarecrow reasons, "There are only two primary colors." No one needs blue, not even the sky and sea. "Brainless to think anything else, really."

They are together, like always, and the boy is on the fringe. They will keep each other warm, and paint themselves in deep shades of comfort, happiness, and meaning. When the world goes colorblind, they will only see each other.

Fiyero was blue like sorrow. Scarecrow is blank like death.

xxx


End file.
